In this election season, reining in Wall Street is clearly a burning issue for many voters. The passion for Wall Street reform is closely wrapped up with working class anger and anxiety driven by wage stagnation and economic insecurity, all within a climate of accelerating wealth and income inequality.
"There are no other countries that we would think of as advanced that don't offer some paid maternity leave," said Amy Traub, a senior policy analyst at Demos, a left-leaning public policy group. "So many countries started guaranteeing maternity leave as more woman started to enter the workplace, and the U.S. just has been a laggard."
I want to know what’s going to happen with the farm workers,” she said, through a translator. “Are you going to include us in this?”
Bhandary-Alexander said the hearing “couldn’t have been any better,” as a way to connect policy issues with individual narratives.
The board heard from economic experts from the Economic Policy Institute and Demos think tank in previous hearings about how minimum wage increases have affected other cities.
Today President Obama fulfilled his constitutional duty by nominating Judge Merrick Garland to succeed Justice Antonin Scalia on the U.S. Supreme Court. Now the question is whether U.S. Senators will do their jobs.
Over the last decade, an increasing number of cities and states passed laws limiting the use of credit checks in hiring, promotion, and firing. These laws have been motivated by the reality that personal credit history is not relevant to employment and that employment credit checks prevent otherwise qualified workers with flawed credit from finding jobs, and that unemployed workers and historically disadvantaged groups, including people of color, are disproportionately harmed by credit checks.
This report examines the effectiveness of the employment credit check laws enacted so far and finds that unjustified exemptions included in the laws, a failure to pursue enforcement, and a lack of public outreach have prevented these important employment protections from being as effective as they could be.
In a recent report, Demos and the Public Interest Research Group showed how many viable candidates, including many candidates of color, struggle to compete against better-funded incumbents.
With the 2016 Presidential election bringing renewed attention to rising college costs, UC Berkeley researchers have just released a groundbreaking study on broad and growing financial inequalities in U.S. higher education. Entitled “The Financialization of U.S. Higher Education,” it’s available online here.
When we agreed to help reform the NYPD’s stop and frisk practice in the landmark class action Floyd v. the City of New York, we knew we were taking on a great responsibility.
Public financing of elections, as a state and local democracy reform, can help enhance the political voice and power of working-class people and people of color. It is an effective antidote to the outsized influence corporations and major donors currently have on both politics and policy.